Here’s what I read in 2023… would love to see what you read or hear what your favorite books of the year were and why!
I put asterisks next to my favorites…
January
Erik Parens - Surgically Shaping Children
Edward Shorter - From Paralysis to Fatigue (re-read)
Abigail Favale - The Genesis of Gender*
February
Erik Parens - Shaping Our Selves: On Technology, Flourishing, and a Habit of Thinking*
Philippa Levine - Eugenics: A Short Introduction
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (read about half of it, skimmed the rest)
Julie Bindel - Feminism for Women
Chandak Sengoopta - The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850-1950
Kathy Davis - Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Plastic Surgery*
Andrew Doyle - The New Puritans*
March
John Hoberman - Testosterone Dreams
Ursula Le Guin - The Last Interview
Deborah Levy - Things I Don't Want to Know
Edward Shorter - Women's Bodies (re-read)
April
Elizabeth Haiken - Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery
Victoria Smith - Hags
John McPhee - The Crofter and the Laird*
Marina Warner - Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds*
May
Hannah Barnes - Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children*
Annie Ernaux - Simple Passions
Leslie Lothstein - Female-to-Male Transsexualism
Rachel Cusk - Outline (re-read)
Mary Harrington - Feminism Against Progress
June
Holly Grigg-Small - Sweetening the Pill: How we got hooked on hormonal birth control
Bernice Hausman - Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender*
Jules Gill Peterson - Histories of the Transgender Child (really and truly atrocious, from the sentence-level on up)
Orlando Figes - The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (re-read)
July
Ariel Levy - The Rules Do Not Apply
Steven Ungerleider - Faust's Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine
Burkhard Bilger - Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets*
Kathy Davis - Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery
Amanda Montell - Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (skimmed, there was a better book in there somewhere…)
Diane Twachtmann-Cullen - A Passion to Believe: Autism and the Facilitated Communication Phenomenon (my brother, who read this on my recommendation, informs me this was pretty dry but it was so interesting!)
Nora Jacobson - Cleavage: The Ironies of the Man-Made Breast
August
Aldous Huxley - Words and Their Meanings
Gerald Posner - Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America
Tara Isabella Burton - Strange Rites (skimmed)
Deborah Levy - Beautiful Mutants
Alex Bakker - The Dutch Approach (fascinating but grim)
September
Rachel Cusk - Transit (re-read)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - In the First Circle
Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano, and Stella O'Malley - When Kids Say They're Trans
Sigmund Freud - The Schreber Case
Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans
October
Marci Shore - A Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe*
Katja Hoyer - Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990 (skimmed)
Joanna Biggs - A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again
Graham Linehan - Tough Crowd*
Robert Jay Lifton - The Nazi Doctors* (re-read)
November
Amy Lutz - Chasing the Intact Mind*
Rachel Aviv - Strangers to Ourselves
Barbara Duden - The Woman Beneath the Skin*
Thomas Sowell - The Vision of the Anointed (skimmed)
Robert Bly - More Than True
Janja Lalich and Margaret Singer - Crazy Therapies: What are they? Do they work?
December
Josef Czapski - Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia*
Gary Alan Fine - Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing as Social Worlds
Jack El-Hai - The Lobotomist
Eileen Barker - The Making of a Moonie
Dan McAdams - The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self
Joseph Heller - Catch-22*
Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia (re-read)*
Robert Jay Lifton - Destroying the World in Order to Save It (re-read)*
Great list! Thank you for sharing it. I apologize if I missed this (or maybe you read it in an earlier year) but I think Suzanne O'Sullivan's The Sleeping Beauties would be perfect for your research. It describes almost every single angle of ROGD and the trans social contagion without ever talking about gender. It's fascinating
Yesss I’ve been waiting for an Eliza booklist to drop! I always like to see what people read- it’s such an unfiltered glimpse into people’s psyches.
My top 5 from 2023 in no particular order:
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf- Why have I never read this before? Probably the most empowering thing I’ve ever read as a woman in a creative field, period. An essay answering the question: what does a woman need to be capable of feats of creative greatness? Answer: 1. Her own money and 2. A room of her own. Woolf’s assessment of gender dynamics is shrewd and unflinching, yet compassionate. I doubt she could have imagined where we would be today. It was shocking to experience how much more feminist and empowering writing from the 1920’s is on this issue than so-called “feminist texts” from the 2020’s. Also, unexpectedly hilarious- what a delightful sense of humor she had! A great read, frankly, for ANYONE who seeks to create ‘good’ art.)
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip- ignore the dated, cheesy fantasy book covers from the 60’s, this book was a moving story about, among other things, a young woman choosing to value both freedom, and the ability to love others (specifically, she comes to love both a man and a child) and to handle the way our love for other people affects our experience of freedom. This is the kind of story that should be a Disney movie for today’s little girls.
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro- short stories about music and dark nights of the soul or else aging and death. Melancholic and moving. The story “Cellists” hit extremely close to home for me, as a musician. I now ‘get’ the worship for Ishiguro’s writing: his sentences don’t feel like sentences. You read them and the story is just ‘happening.’ It’s hard to explain but it’s awe inspiring, and also made me realize what so many authors who try to wield a stark, spare writing style are trying to achieve.
Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones by Hettie Judah- Possibly a top 3 favorite book of the year. Each short chapter has beautiful color illustrations snd some general information about each stone, but the chapter would meander into some unexpected path, so it would be like: Malachite: and suddenly I’m learning about Russian history; Rubies: Spanish imperialism; Globigerina limestone: ancient Malta; Cinnabar: Indian alchemy. Reading it was like opening a knowledge jewel box. It’ll be a definite reread, and there are good sized endnotes with books and articles to add to my reading list, mostly on the subjects of art, history, economics, fashion, and craft.
Visions of Beauty- an art collection of work by Kinuko Y. Craft. She illustrated the covers of some of the fantasy novels I loved as a girl, and so I was excited to find her on Instagram and see that there would be a book published of her work. Her art usually depicts fantastical and extremely detailed paintings of beautiful and powerful-looking women. I would make a cup of tea before bed and immerse myself in her art like a seeing eye book. I appreciated her comments in the book about her obsession with beauty, and how good art isn’t possible without obsession.
Not quite a top five, but a bonus for gender relevance:
The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting by Evanna Lynch- a memoir about Evanna’s experience with anorexia, general body dysmorphia, self loathing, and her acting career. Similar to Hadley Freeman’s book about anorexia. I listened to the audiobook which is read by Evanna and enjoyed her brutally dark humor and sharp wit. This memoir has the problem that all memoirs written by young adults have, which is that it gets up to the present, and just sort of peters out because everyone in their 30’s is way too close to what just happened over the past few decades and doesn’t know how to wrap things up satisfyingly without more distance in the form of more age. Still, it was a moving read, and a useful look into what approaches best help heal mental illnesses like body dysmorphia. Incidentally, Evanna is also the only young Harry Potter actor to backtrack on initial comments about Rowling and gender, come to Jo’s defense, and be willing to wade into the complexity of the trans debate- and I can see why. She’s a deep soul, and very brave. She has more similarities to her character Luna Lovegood than she seems to realize.